PoetryToTheMasses Weekly Feature 154

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He is more than a hero - Sappho, translated by Mary Barnard

He is more than a hero

He is a god in my eyes--
the man who is allowed 
to sit beside you--he

who listens intimately 
to the sweet murmur of 
your voice, the enticing

laughter that makes my own
heart beat fast. If I meet
you suddenly, I can't

speak--my tongue is broken;
a thin flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,

hearing only my own ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body

and I turn paler than 
dry grass. At such times
death isn't far from me 

- :devback-bones

i met a girl once
who told me she had a boy 
with a war set in the crooks of his lungs
and vocal cords, the perfect mix between 
a hippie and a marxist,

with fire in his eyes the size of hammers
and coal, a manifesto of cold stares and
the distant histories of hiroshimas, nagasakis
and normandys-

words stuck on the thickest
parts of his lips, sealed in the cracks
with democracy and deity, hitlers 
and stalins and mussolinis,
the pawn of the highest pedigree. 

but he had his own soviets, americans 
and europeans, she said:
the calluses, muscles, of his own skin-
the finest of cells of the working class,

the bone and the brittle of worth and vice,
entitlements accompanied by the ache of

the bitten, copper tongues of liberty.

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